The Liverpool Care Pathway has become a checklist for killing. This is what happens when a country allows bureaucrats to control healthcare. (Yes, I am issuing an unsubtle warning about Obamacare.)

The Pathway was designed by health bureaucrats to fix a real problem: Too many patients were being allowed to die in pain in UK hospitals. In centralized systems, the answer to a problem is always more technocracy. So, the Liverpool Care Pathway was put into place to ensure that dying patients receive adequate pain control, including in the rare instances that it is necessary, sedation.

But rather than being patient-centered, it became a bureaucratic nightmare: Patient elderly or dying: Check. Pathway instituted whether the patient requires it or not: Check. It got so bad that some who weren’t dying have been sedated and dehydrated to death.

Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults. But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies. One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone. Writing in a leading medical journal, the physician revealed the process can take an average of ten days during which a baby becomes ‘smaller and shrunken’…

According to the BMJ article, the doctor involved had presided over ten such deaths in just one hospital neonatal unit. In a response to the article, Dr Laura de Rooy, a consultant neonatologist at St George’s Hospital NHS Trust in London writing on the BMJ website, said: ‘It is a huge supposition to think they do not feel hunger or thirst.’ The LCP for children has been developed in the North West, where the LCP itself was pioneered in the 1990s. It involves the discharge to home or to a hospice of children who are given a document detailing their ‘end of life’ care.

One seen by the Mail, called ‘Liverpool Pathway for the Dying Child’ is issued by the Royal Liverpool Children’s NHS Trust in conjunction with the flagship children’s hospital Alder Hey. It includes tick boxes, filled out by hospital doctors, on medicines, nutrients and fluids to be stopped.

But Wesley, the parents approve, right?

Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice paediatric nurse, has written to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health to criticise the use of death pathways for children. ‘I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die’ She said: ‘The parents feel coerced, at a very traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom they are told by doctors has only has a few days to live. It is very difficult to predict death. I have seen a “reasonable” number of children recover after being taken off the pathway.

‘I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die. I witnessed a 14 year-old boy with cancer die with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when doctors refused to give him liquids by tube. His death was agonising for him, and for us nurses to watch. This is euthanasia by the backdoor.’

Yes it is.

You watch: The way things are going in the UK, the answer won’t be to stop dehydrating, but to lethally inject.

The parents feel coerced, at a very traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom they are told by doctors has only has a few days to live. It is very difficult to predict death.

Ping!

2
posted on 11/29/2012 3:06:39 PM PST
by NYer
("Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." --Jeremiah 1:5)

Satan, the prince of this world, is having the time
of his life. The obvious: life was created by God.
Satan hates God. Satan hates everything God creates.
Satan has willing accomplices not just in individuals,
but in the “systems” of the world.

But a large portion of woe is being built up for these
individuals and systems:

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,
who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”
- Isaiah 5:20

The NICU’s will be the first to see Obamacare’s death panels and many high risk infants that are now given care will simply be allowed to die under the government protocols. The Nazis used the same rationale to justify the killing of the handicapped and elderly saying their care cost the state too much money.

No, it isn’t - but it is the thing that will open the door to it. Look, this sort of thing happens all the time NOW - for example, no one is going to give an 85 year old person a kidney because “they won’t survive the operation”...then it will be 75,65,55...by the way, the limit in Great Britain is now 50.

11
posted on 11/29/2012 3:52:06 PM PST
by The Antiyuppie
("When small men cast long shadows, then it is very late in the day.")

One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone.

It would be kinder if the doctor had put a bullet in the brain of these poor babies. Death by starvation and dehydration is the ultimate in slow torture. This is a horrible bureaucratic method of "hands off" killing of the "unwanted".

15
posted on 11/29/2012 6:06:43 PM PST
by Flick Lives
(We're going to be just like the old Soviet Union, but with free cell phones!)

My grandfather was among the first at Omaha Beach and went to Buchenwald. He fought and most likely killed people with ideas such as these during his tour in France and Germany. The Axis lost but in a way, they won since we have people like this both in the UK and US. B-(

16
posted on 11/29/2012 8:02:18 PM PST
by Nowhere Man
(It is about time we re-enact Normandy, at the shores of the Potomac.)

I have personal experience with being handed the stuff nurses give out about how dehydration is painless, has an anesthetic effect, and causes euphoria in some patients. Because I was not the family member responsible for making the decisions, there was nothing I could do except argue.

These lies need to be addressed so people understand that when a doctor or nurse says dehydration is pleasant or even tolerable, that person needs to be regarded much like a Nazi doctor or nurse in a death camp. Having a medical degree may prove a person has training, but not that they have the conscience to use the training in a moral manner.

Common sense should cause people to realize that people dying of thirst is a horrible death. We already know dehydration is horrible if it happens in a desert or in the middle of an ocean, so why is dehydration better in a soft hospital bed? “Water, water, everywhere but not a drop to drink” is an indicator of the horrible way people sometimes died after shipwrecks when they saw salty seawater all around them and couldn’t drink it because of the salt content.

It would be kinder if the doctor had put a bullet in the brain of these poor babies. Death by starvation and dehydration is the ultimate in slow torture. This is a horrible bureaucratic method of "hands off" killing of the "unwanted".

Exactly ...if you are going to "put them down" like a dog, at least make it painless

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